Topic: Old DAT taper... new to laptop recording

[RDunn]

I'm a longtime DAT taper who has just signed on to this list and have a few questions I wanted to ask regarding non-DAT digital recording

I recently picked up a Sony Vaio PCK-K13 (P4 280 mhz) for work, but since I'm mainly using it as a desktop replacement (it's big)... I don't plan on taping at shows with it.....  It is however much faster than my home computer, so I would like to use it for DAT > CD transfers.

First question....  What are your thoughts on the VX Pocket 440's that are currently selling cheaply on Ebay?  I don't intend to use it for 4 channel, but unless I can find a VX Pocket2 for the same or less money, it seems like the way to go.  Or are there better options?

Question 2.... Since most of what I'll be doing is transferring DATs to CD's, what do you suggest for recording software?  I have Soundforge 6.0 and CD Wave currently on my machine.... but from what I've read, I understand SF to be a memory hog.  Any thoughts on CD Wave for recording?  I know that it's highly used for splitting wav's into tracks, and it seems to work fine for recording, but is there anything wrong or bad about it for recording? 

My last questions are concerning live taping at shows...... I'm trying to get away from using my Tascam DAP-1 (and tape in general) and move to a small hard drive based recording system. I have been using an Ipaq rig since last fall.... and for the most part I like the Ipaq setup... BUT I've noticed an occaisional "missing sample" on a couple of recordings & I'm not 100% confident I'll get perfect recordings. If money was no object, I'd place an order for the new Sound Devices recorders, but that's not in my immediate future.  At this point I'm mainly looking to get reliable 16 bit recordings and since I know a lot of folks are using Nomad JB3's.....  I'm curious what people that have used them think.  I remember discussions on DAT-heads a few years ago when those things came out about missing samples, but didn't know if that had been resolved.  This may or may not be the correct "forum" for JB3 questions, but I'm seeing these in the lineage for a lot of recordings now and wanted to find out how reliable they are.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Robbie Dunn

PS  Here's a link some old pics of my "library"....
http://www.mindspring.com/~goheels/library.html
You'll see I've got a few DATs to transfer 

[kindms]

Well I just recently got a VX 440 off ebay for really cheap. I was a little skeptical if it was legit because the price was so low. It came as described. New in box. Sealed and all orginal etc etc. I was running UA-5 -> USB but was having some digi issues that seem to suggest the USB to blame but I still am not %100 sure. I ran the USB for over a year issue free. Anyway. The VX440 is perfect for DAT to lappy transfer. It has the abilty to lock on the the master clock and do bit perfect transfers. As far as software goes. Soundforge will do just nicely for 16Bit Transfers it is a little memory intensive but specs on your laptop should have no issues with it at all. For live recording however you cannot beat some of the functions in Wavelab and the U2 algorithm is very nice. The autosplit feature makes life so much less stressful. I recently switched from SF6.0 to Wavelab for live recording. I did my first show with it Friday night at the Knitting Factory in NYC. The auto-split worked like a charm (It is only really useful if you are doing 24Bit recordings).